Faith and Reason in “Father Brown”

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If one is merely a skeptic, one must sooner or later ask the question, “Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic–if, as the scientists claim, they are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?”

–G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (emphasis mine)

Part of the trouble with our culture today is that we take so many wondrous developments for granted, without stopping to think how they became possible. We have accepted an unspoken assumption that Man grows ever wiser and more capable of ingenious invention. Our technology is the inevitable result of evolutionary progress. But is it?

Biophysicist Stephen C. Meyer observes: “The information contained in an English sentence or computer software does not derive from the chemistry of the ink or the physics of magnetism, but from a source extrinsic to physics and chemistry altogether. Indeed, in both cases, the message transcends the properties of the medium.” (Signature in the Cell, emphasis mine)

The materialist worldview claims that life originated spontaneously and randomly out of organic materials, and then through random mutations began to become more complex. But the mechanisms within even a single cell are so complicated and interdependent that it is difficult to see how random processes could have come together so serendipitously as to allow function…before the mutation was discarded by the organism as worthless!

This is the contention of scientists such as Stephen Meyer, Michael Behe, Guillermo Gonzales, William Dembski, and a host of others who are proponents of Intelligent Design theory. These men and women are simply following in the footsteps of the scientists who inaugurated the scientific revolution. For Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton and others “there were laws of nature only because there had been a [Divine] Legislator.”

If man is only a collection of chemical reactions, then why should his thoughts and theories be more valid if he says, “All life is random” than if he says, “All life is designed”? How are any of his thoughts trustworthy? This is what lead Chesterton to have Father Brown assert: “Life is always reasonable. Even God is bound by reason. If He were not, nothing could be reasonable.”


For further reading

Behe, Michael. Darwin’s Black Box
The Edge of Evolution
Darwin Devolves
Chesterton, G.K. The Everlasting Man
Heretics
Orthodoxy
Demski, William. Intelligent Design
The Design Revolution
Meyer, Stephen C. Signature in the Cell
Return of the God Hypothesis
Wiker, Benjamin
& Witt, Jonathan. A Meaningful World: How the arts and sciences
reveal the genius of nature